Alabama's civil rights trail

On this day in 1955, Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on the No. 2857 bus. To mark the anniversary, read Nigel Richardson's account of a Alabama's civil rights trail, originally published on July 2, 2014

The Rev Thomas Linton was standing in the barber shop in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, where he has worked since 1951, a dapper figure in dark suit and polished shoes. “They sent 97 people to jail that day. I sent 37 people to the hospital.” He pointed at his feet. “The floor was covered with people bleeding. We used every towel we had.”

Barber shops occupy a unique place in African-American culture – a place to gossip and confide and, in the era of racial segregation, a sanctuary. If this old green chair, if this improbably large collection of shaving mugs, could talk…

Civil rights campaigner Dr Martin Luther King with a march from Selma, Alabama, to the state capital in Montgomery in 1965 Photo: Getty

They’d be shouting over each other to tell you about the Tuesday in June 1964 when scores of bloody and beaten marchers were ushered to safety through this door. A hate-filled white mob had set about them with “baseball bats, billy clubs and I don’t know what else” for the crime of asking to be treated equally.

This event, which came to be known as “Bloody Tuesday”, occupies a mere footnote in the history of the civil rights struggle in the United States. Yet it was part of a tide of action and feeling that, 50 years ago next Wednesday , reached critical mass with the signing into US law of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, banning segregation in public places and employment discrimination based on race.

On a week-long driving tour of Alabama I visited the places, and revisited the milestones, that have become synonymous with black Americans’ struggle for freedom: Birmingham and the 16th St Baptist Church, Selma and the March to Montgomery, Rosa Parks and the bus boycott. And the Rev Linton, in his Tuscaloosa barber shop.

Alongside him was his friend, Harrison “Mailman” Taylor, an affable bear of a man compared to the well-dressed Linton. “I was just a foot soldier,” said Taylor. “He was a leader. He was awesome.” Marshalled by Dr Martin Luther King Jr (the orchestrator of the movement’s non-violent tactics) and other charismatic national figures, each community had its inspirational leaders and its many foot soldiers.

From the churches they poured to challenge – through pickets, sit-ins, meetings and marches – the “Jim Crow” laws under which cinemas, public lavatories, lifts, lunch counters and many other public spaces were segregated (it was even prohibited for black people to go into a shoe shop and try on shoes – they had to draw an outline of their feet on a piece of cardboard and take that in).

Waiting for them were tooled-up state troopers and white vigilantes, empowered and incited by racist chiefs. These confrontations flared across the South in the early to mid Sixties but were most intense and significant in Alabama – and the nexus of division was Birmingham, where I started my tour.

The Alabama State Capitol Building Photo: Alamy

The magnolia was blooming in the city once known as “Bombingham” for the nearly 50 racially motivated bombings of black premises that went unsolved between the Forties and the mid-Sixties. The corner of 16th St and 6th Ave, which formed the coordinates of hate 50 years ago, was quiet on this Saturday morning – just a few out-of-towners taking photographs of the brown-brick church and the sculptures that face it on the edge of Kelly Ingram Park.

The church is the 16th St Baptist Church, heart and soul of Birmingham’s civil rights movement, and the four bronze figures represent the young girls, aged 11 to 14, who were murdered there on September 15 1963 when the Ku Klux Klan planted a bomb. Barry McNealy, a teacher and civil rights historian, took me down to the basement kitchen of the church.

“Where you’re standing right now, this is where the blast took place,” he said. “When they found those little girls, their bodies were all four fused together.” Sixteen blocks away, Rickey Powell heard the bomb go off. “I lost three friends,” Powell said. “I never had closure because I never saw the bodies.”

We met Powell a couple of blocks south-east of the church. A jazz vocalist who has toured with Gloria Gaynor, he showed us around the Alabama Jazz Hall of Fame which celebrates Birmingham’s many serious syncopation artists, from Lionel Hampton to Erskine Hawkins. Thanks to music, Powell said, “I’ve been to places that even rich white folks haven’t been.”

But his conversation kept veering back to the events of 50 years ago. Four months before the church bombing, Powell had been a foot soldier in a series of youth-led actions in the area of Kelly Ingram Park that were calibrated to provoke the authorities into overreaction. They obliged.

The historic Edmund Pettus Bridge Photo: Alamy

Eugene “Bull” Connor, the city’s Commissioner for Public Safety, had children arrested in their thousands – with jails full to overflowing Powell was locked in a stable “with all the horse stuff”. Then Connor ordered the use of attack dogs and fire hoses – actions depicted in steel sculptures placed throughout the park.

One of these, of a boy being attacked by a snarling police dog, is based on a photograph published in The New York Times that President Kennedy said made him feel “sick”. Such exposure helped to hasten the passage of the Civil Rights Act that was signed off by LBJ after Kennedy’s assassination. “Most of the Act was written right here in this park,” McNealy said. “Because of the severity of what went on here.”

From slavery to segregation, Alabama has a troubled history that seemed reflected in the stormy weather as I drove south-west from Birmingham to Tuscaloosa, and on to Selma. Silhouetted by lightning, the old St James Hotel in Selma felt straight out of a Southern Gothic novel – ironwork on the verandas, a solitary desk clerk and mine the solitary reservation for that Sunday night.

The next morning, when I met Joanne Bland in the lobby, her first question was: “Did the ghosts get ya?” Apparently Frank and Jesse James stayed in the hotel and are said to haunt it, but Bland and I were concerned with other spectres. “It’s so recent,” she said of the events of 1965. “We’re still here.”

Selma is the place where Black America organised and marched for the right to vote and Bland, a child at the time, was there – another of these foot soldiers who are witnesses to history. Now she conducts civil rights tours of Selma, teaching children what they scarcely learn in school (“Our education system was not designed for non-whites,” she said).

We drove along Martin Luther King St (“Every good city has one”) to the Romanesque towers of Brown Chapel, Dr King’s HQ during the actions of 1965 and the starting point for the marches. Bland grew up in a house opposite the chapel. “It was almost impossible not to be involved,” she said.

On March 7, 1965 she joined some 600 others to march to the State Capitol in Montgomery, 50 miles east along Highway 80. They were protesting at the shooting dead by a state trooper of a demonstrator called Jimmie Lee Jackson in nearby Marion. “I was 11 years old,” said Bland, leading me to the fenced-off yard where the march began. “I had never experienced violence. Marching to me was fun.”

She was blooded that day. When the ranks of protesters tried to leave town by the Edmund Pettus Bridge across the Alabama River, they were met by state troopers and Sheriff Jim Clark and his mob of “deputised volunteers”. Armed with batons, bullwhips and rubber tubing wrapped with barbed wire – and cheered on by white bystanders – they drove the marchers all the way back to the First Baptist Church, a couple of blocks along from Brown Chapel.

“They shot out windows in the houses across from First Baptist,” said Bland. “They came into the church and started beating us again. What happened at the bridge didn’t stop at the bridge. It happened down here all night long.”

“Bloody Sunday,” it was called – a spectacle caught on film that revolted the world and became as much a defining moment as the violence in Birmingham. Later that month the Selma marchers, under heavy protection, did reach Montgomery and on August 6 1965 the Voting Rights Act was signed into law by President Johnson.

So I followed the marchers into Montgomery, the Alabama State Capital, a friendly, walkable city on the Alabama River with a revamped waterfront and downtown area. A decade before the events in Selma the refusal of Rosa Parks to give up her bus seat to a white man in Montgomery had a sort of butterfly’s wing effect on the nascent civil rights movement.

The 16th street baptist church that was the centre of the movement Photo: Alamy

Parks was arrested as the bus reached the old Empire Theatre on Montgomery St, the site of which is now occupied by the Rosa Parks Museum. The museum tells the story of what happened in a film projected from the interior of a real bus from the city’s fleet of 1955 – it fills with passengers, the bespectacled lady in a window seat calmly defies the driver’s order to stand up and move back, and history changes course.

Her action triggered a 13-month bus boycott coordinated by Dr King from the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, of which he was then pastor. His home, the Dexter Parsonage on Centennial Hill, was bombed in January 1956. He and his family narrowly escaped injury (there’s still a hole in the floor of the porch) but the haters got him in the end of course – he was assassinated in Memphis in 1968.

Parks died in 2005 but if she were still alive I suspect she would look at today’s Alabama – where poverty levels among African Americans remain high – and say the same as Bland in Selma: “We’ve come a long way, don’t get me wrong. But we have a long way to go.”

Before leaving Selma I walked the Edmund Pettus Bridge myself, cresting the high point and trying to imagine the troopers and the baying thugs waiting on the other side. I was thinking of the words of Atticus Finch in that famous Alabaman novel To Kill a Mockingbird, published just a few years before the Selma marches: “You never really understand a person… until you climb into his skin and walk around in it.” But the imagination of this white man failed him.

How to do it

America As You Like It (020 8742 8299; americaasyoulikeit.com) offers various of tours of the Deep South that include sights in Alabama. From £1,075 per person.